Testing of HOM Coupler Designs on a Single Cell Niobium Cavity

Coaxial higher order mode (HOM) couplers were developed initially for HERA cavities and subsequently for TESLA cavities. They were adopted later for SNS and Jlab upgrade cavities. The principle of operation is the rejection of the fundamental mode by the tunable filter and the transmission of the HOMs. It has been recognized recently that for continuous wave or high duty factor applications of the TESLA coupler the output pick-up probe must stay superconducting in order to avoid its heating by the fundamental mode residual magnetic field leading to deterioration of the cavity quality factor. In addition, the thermal conduction of existing rf feedthrough designs is only marginally sufficient to keep even the niobium probe tip superconducting in cw operation. We have equipped a single-cell niobium cavity with the modified HOM couplers and tested the new designs by measuring Q vs E
acc
behavior at 2 K for different feedthroughs and probe tip materials.